Five fisherman from Sri Lanka died last month after drinking the unknown liquid they found in bottles floating about 300 miles offshore. The fisherman reportedly believed the bottles contained foreign liquor.
Ceylon Today reports that efforts are underway to inform nearby fishing trawlers about the dangers of drinking from floating bottles. It’s a good thing the authorities are doing that because, otherwise, the most common sense thing to do when finding unidentified liquids is to drink them.
Better planning would have saved their lives. You can also plan better when negotiating your staffing agency agreements. Here’s a clause you can include that won’t save lives but will save money.
Overtime Multiplier Caps
When a non-exempt temp works more than 40 hours in a week, the worker must receive overtime pay of 1.5x. But that doesn’t mean you need to pay the same markup rate to the agency for that extra .5x premium.
Here’s what you can do instead.
Suppose you pay a 40% markup on the hourly rate the agency pays to its workers. For a worker receiving $10/hour, you pay the agency $14, The agency gets $4 in revenue for one hour of work provided.
But suppose the same worker works 50 hours in a week. The extra ten hours are paid to the worker at $15/hour, which means the agency gets $6 in revenue for those hours. Here’s the math: 15 x 1.4 = $21, less the $15 that goes back to the worker = $6.
Why should the agency get $6 instead of $4 for the same hour worked? It’s a windfall. You can cap that with an Overtime Multiplier Clause.
The clause would say, essentially, that for straight time, the agency gets a 40% premium. For overtime hours, the markup is the same 40% on the straight time (the 1.0x), then the overtime premium (the extra 0.5x) is reimbursed with no markup on the premiums portion of the pay (the 0.5x).
The worker gets $15, but you pay the agency $19 for that hour, not $21.
In future posts, I’ll address other money-saving clauses you can add to your staffing agency agreements.
In the meantime, remember not to drink from any bottles you may find floating at sea.
© 2024 Todd Lebowitz, posted on WhoIsMyEmployee.com, Exploring Issues of Independent Contractor Misclassification and Joint Employment. All rights reserved.
